Let’s get straight to the point. I am looking at ways to cut production time when making OELVN’s and one of the most time consuming is BG-CG’s… I have to do something about it. No deny… 3D is fast, flexible, re-usable but no matter what I try I just can’t seem to make it look like it was deliciously drawn by an artist… it looked odd and out of place no matter how you look at it (see previous posts).

Doing things the old fashion way will guarantee delicious art but will take at least 5 to 6 hours of precious time… something I don’t have…

So why not combine both!… You’ll get the convenience of 3D and still savor delicious 2D flavor…

First, create the basic scene using very basic 3D objects…

Then, apply delicious texture to your 3D scene. It helps if your texture already had this “Anime/Cartoony” look to it. Export it into any image format you desire (preferably with transparent sky)

Now, use global illumination (or lighting for very lazy people… like me) to create shadows. Once there is shadows, hide the textures and the lines and make the sky and ground white so only shadow is visible. Export as image type of your choice.

Now you have two images, the texture one and the shadow layer. Using any image manipulating program (like Photoshop or GIMP) Open the texture layer and you “manually” add various elements (like additional lighting and shiny… stuff and trees). Then you add the shadow layer above and set it to multiply. You see, setting a layer to “multiply” will make lighter colors disappear so only the shadow is now visible… then you adjust the transparency of the layer till you are satisfied…

What about completion time?… Yes it is slightly “longer” than all 3D process but the extra time being added to the process of making this delicious BG CG is definitely much much less than going all traditional and is very much worth it… In case you’re wondering… this BG including all variations took only 3.5 hours (also the tree)… see how convenient?…

Haha, Another nice work from mugenjohncel. May I ask you a question (I’m already asking you now) what program did you use?. Is is google sketch-up or Blender. I’m currently learning how to use Google Sketch-Up (actually planning to buy the pro). Could you shed some light to a newbie like me.

I used sketchup for the basic structures. For the trees, I imported several png tree textures with transparency and set them to “always face user” to “on”. Sketchup pro is expensive so I suggest you invest instead in a decent renderer like IDX Renditioner or the free kerkythea rendered for sketchup.

Anyway, sketchup is fast and easy to use but not very good when it comes to organic modeling. So learning Blender at the same time is also recommended…